Interview With Atish Ranjan of TechTricksWorld.com (Bloggers’ Interview #2)
Hello dear readers, it’s time to Meet the Blooger and we are here with an awesome guest with us. Atish Ranjan of TechTricksWorld.com needs no introduction. His dedication towards what he does and the helping nature have helped him to make it really big in this blogosphere.
Atish is an young pro-blogger from India and is an inspiration to many. He was associated with the SEO field for quite a long time and finally have taken the move towards entrepreneurship. He has been successfully running 20+ blogs. With a whole lot of tasks associated, it is truly commendable how he is managing his time and efforts.
In this detailed interview with GROWBLOGGING, he has discussed about how to run multiple blogs effectively, planning a successful Giveawayfor driving good traffic and his other ventures. He has also shared some tips about how to cope up with the uncertainties of the monetary aspect of blogging.
We are very much thankful to Atish for taking time to answer all the questions and making every answer a great tip. So why wait! Let’s start the discussion now.
Question: Hi Atish, welcome to WPB360. Could you please let the readers know a bit more about you?
Hi Manidipa, thank you so much for having me here on your blog.
I am Atish Ranjan from TechTricksWorld.com, and I have been blogging since 2010. I am basically from a small city Sitamarhi that is situated in the Indian state Bihar. Currently, I stay in New Delhi – the capital city of India.
I studied in my native till Matriculation, and then moved to Delhi where I studied intermediate (11th and 12th), and then BCA (Bachelor of Computer Applications).
After that I worked as an SEO analyst for various companies for around 4-5 years.
Question: Atish, you have quit your job for being an entrepreneur. Was the decision tough? How your family reacted to that?
Atish: I started doing both job and blogging in 2010, and I have been maintaining my blog(s) along with my day job. The first job was very interesting and enjoying but gradually I started to hate working for others and made up my mind to do blogging for full time.
But, situations were not that great at that time, so I was bound to work for the company. However, in 2015, I decided to leave the company I was working for. March 31st, 2015 was the last day in that company, and since then I have been blogging full-time.
In the beginning, I had a fear of leaving job because I am a family man and have so many responsibilities and commitments. However, I always believed that to make something big; you need to take risks. I did take the risk, and I never regretted my decision of being a full-time entrepreneur.
I always take my decisions after discussing with my family members, so there was nothing of sudden. But, yes my mumma said that if you have trust in your blogging stuff, you can leave the job and work on your own. I must say, my mom, brothers, and my wife all supported my decision, and now things are going good, in fact, better.
Question: How many blogs are you running currently? Please brief a little bit about them.
Atish: There are many blogs with me. There is not a number because I with my partner Zainil, keep on launching various niche blogs, event blogs, micro niche blogs, etc. However, as you are asking for a number, I might have 20 blogs that are running and a few unused domains. Most of them are solely for money making. The list includes general blogs, niche blogs, some event blogs, and some micro niche blogs.
But, my main blogs are TechTricksWorld.com, Litabi.com, and AtishRanjan.com. All of these are multi-niche blogs where you can find articles related to blogging, SEO, Tech, business, Software, etc. However, on atishranjan.com I occasionally write about the things that I like for example, I wrote a post about the importance of home town for me.
Question: How do you distribute your time in multiple blogs? Could you please share about your daily blogging routine?
Atish: To be honest, I don’t work on every blog every day rather I focus more on my main blog which is TechTricksWorld and a few others. I don’t work alone as I have a dedicated team of professionals who work with us so, I mostly devote my time managing my team and provide them the details of the jobs to be done.
I use my time to get profitable keywords and think of new topics and then assigning them to the writers who write for different blogs of ours. After getting the content from them, I do proof-read each article at least 2 times to make sure there are no errors left before publishing the post.
In short, I don’t have a plan or schedule of day to day working. I just do the things that come in front of me. However, the first thing I do is to check my emails and reply to clients, bloggers and others. It does take a lot of time, but it is very important. Once I am done with the emails, I moderate comments on the blog(s), and reply to them.
After this, I do assign work to my team in which there are content writers, and Virtual Assistants. While assigning topics, I do research for keywords and do a little bit of competitive analysis. Apart from these, I read at least 2 articles every day and try to get some content ideas from them as well.
Time to time, I do check the technical stuff of all blogs for the plugin, themes, and WP updates, broken link, and other stuff. I do check my analytics and Adsense accounts once in a day at least.
If still I have time, I do write an article as I love writing♥
Question: What was the objective behind starting TechTricksWorld?
Atish: When I started, I was not aware of blogging stuff much. I was just tempted to share something online. So, the primary objective was to share useful stuff online and make my blog popular.
Later as I learned a lot of things, more objectives were added. Lolz
Question: Atish, you and Zainil make a great team together. What is your suggestion for working efficiently in partnership?
Atish: Thank you so much for saying so, Manidipa. Just one suggestion I would like to give is, to be honest with each other. Put the money factor aside and try to build a great team. Keep the main objective of your partnership in mind.
You will be surprised to hear that there has not been a single misunderstanding happened till date between Zainil and me, and that makes our partnership and business successful.
Question: Please let us know about some of your strengths that really helped you in many aspects of blogging?
Atish: I can work for longer hours, I don’t give up easily, and I believe in hard work. These are my strengths I think, and these helped me a lot growing my blogging business over the time.
Question: I have seen many niche blogs are doing extremely well with just proper SEO & link building. Being into SEO field for such a long time, do you think SEO can outperform content?
Atish: For the short term, yes proper SEO without having great content can rank better. But, for a longer run, you must need very good content on your blog. I too run a few micro niche blogs, but I make sure that the articles I publish there are of high quality as it is the base of good SEO.
Good content with proper keywords and other on-page stuffs is must have if you want to rank well for longer run. Link building comes after that.
Question: What is/are the most crucial Search engine changes & updates in 2016?
Atish: In the early days, I used to keep a track of all updates of search engines. But, now specifically Google (specifically) is rolling updates too frequently, so that I stopped keeping track.
However, I do read about all updates when they roll out. Rather than writing about all those updates, I would like to give you a link where you can see all the major and minor Google’s updates.
Apart from this, just a few days ago, there was an update from Google in which they have extended the lengths of Titles and Description in SERP previews. I think it is one of the most significant updates of 2016.
Question: Atish, which one is your best traffic driving method that has worked pretty well for you? What is your suggestion to the newbies for driving traffic to their blogs?
Atish: Though I believe in diversification of traffic, I am a huge lover of search engine traffic, and for that I do a lot of things, and yes, they are working well.
I would suggest the newbies to learn keyword research because it is crucial if you really want to get search engine traffic. Try to write detailed guides so that other bloggers would love to mention your post in their articles with your link. These indeed help in boosting search rankings.
Question: You are arranging Giveaways on a regular basis. What are your suggestions for a successful Giveaway planning for driving good traffic?
Atish: My partner Zainil is one who manages Giveaways. Though, I did arrange a few recent giveaways because he was unavailable due to his exams.
However, I would love to share my experience. For giveaways, you must giveaway the product that you think your readers would like to get. Suppose, you have readers that are mostly into online marketing, and you offer them a free software to download movies then you might not get much traffic and engagement on the giveaway. But, if you offer them SEO software or Social media tool as a prize, you will see more engagement because that is what they need and they get benefit from them.
Therefore, understanding your readers and their behavior is very important to plan a giveaway. Google Analytics is an awesome tool for such analysis.
Apart from this, you should choose a good tool like Promosimple, rafflecopter, Punchtab, etc. for running the giveaway. Always make things easier for the readers so that they can enter into giveaway without any hassle. Also, you can keep some tasks to do like FB share, G+ share, Email subscription, etc. in order to enter into giveaway because they help you get more traffic and subscribers to your blog.
Question: Please share about your greatest failure and your learning from the same.
Atish: I face failure and success every single day, and that are what keep me learning new things on day to day basis. However, I consider my greatest blogging failure is when my blog was penalized for unnatural outbound link because I linked out many unnatural links to clients’ website. But, later I was able to revoke the penalty, and then I learned to link out nofollow links to advertisers’ website unless they are of relevant niche and some blog type content sites.
Question: Being an entrepreneur how do you cope up with the uncertainties of the monetary aspect of blogging?
Atish: When I left my day job, I didn’t have so much back up with me, but I did have trust on my blogging venture, and I am very happy to say that things worked out really well after leaving the job. But, yes when I am doing blogging among the crowd of millions or billions of bloggers, I do face few months with low earning as well because there is great competition in the blogging industry. To cope up with the monetary aspect, I do offer some services at my service website Stechie.com.
So, when blogging earning goes low my services help me stay stable in terms of money. However, it is not often when blogging earns me low. It does earn me well every month. And, one more thing, I do have a number of blogs for different purposes and for targeting specific monetization techniques. This also helps me earning money sidewise apart from earnings from my main blogs.
In short, I would say don’t keep all eggs in one basket, and do try all the things you can do to earn money out of your blogging efforts.
Diversification is the key to cope up with the uncertainties of monetary aspect as long as blogging is concerned!
Question: Blogging has taken a big change in recent time. What are your ways to outshine in this very competitive niche?
Atish: To be honest, I don’t do anything special to outshine. I just do my work, and that earns me good respect in the blogging community and fair amount of money. That are what I want. However, I have a hobby of helping everyone as much as I can. This really helped me stand out of the crowd.
Question: What do you love to do when you are not blogging?
Atish:
- Spending time with my family.
- Watching TV especially Cricket Matches.
- Watching movies on my laptop.
Question: What is your best blogging moment so far?
There are hundreds of great blogging moments. But, the first cheque from Google Adsense was the biggest blogging moment because till that time I was not sure that blogging can actually earn money. And, when I got the first cheque, I realized that yes; I can make money out of my blog.
I still remember that day when the cheque arrived. I was in my office, and I got a call from my Mumma that there is something came from Google, I understood that it is the long awaited cheque, and I was too excited to reach my home. That madness was the best moment so far in my blogging career.
Question: Please share some tips for those aspiring bloggers who wants to take this as a full-time career option.
Atish: When it comes to giving tips, I always suggest everyone that don’t start thinking of money making from the day one rather first build a good blog, build traffic, and then monetize.
Always remember “Do what you love” because when you love your work, success is almost guaranteed.
When we talk about blogging, I would suggest work hard with smartness and consistency is crucial for blogging success so maintain it.
Don’t fear to try something new. Invent your own ways of writing, marketing, and promotion.
I would like to Thank you Manidipa for offering me to speak out something about me on your awesome blog.
I wish you good luck for your blogging venture. Hope you will make it big.
Thanks again Atish for sharing some very useful tips with the WPB360 readers. In case you have any question about his blogging journey or want to know any other blogging tips, please feel free to ask in the comments below.